Just one word. quine.
I remembered quines after reading this article.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
IT Request system trouble
Meta is all over us; we don't even need to look too hard.
Yesterday at work we were notified that our IT Request tracking system has a problem: no notification is going out after a request is submitted (as a result, it wasn't clear whether the requests were being processed or not).
I wondered whether someone submitted an IT request asking why no IT requests are being processed. And, once the issue is solved, should IT close this ticket first, or all the ones on which the users didn't get a notification?
Yesterday at work we were notified that our IT Request tracking system has a problem: no notification is going out after a request is submitted (as a result, it wasn't clear whether the requests were being processed or not).
I wondered whether someone submitted an IT request asking why no IT requests are being processed. And, once the issue is solved, should IT close this ticket first, or all the ones on which the users didn't get a notification?
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
metalinguistics
"...we practice metalanguage without realizing the metalingual character of our operations. Whenever the addresser and/or the
addressee need to check up whether they use the same code, speech is focused on the code: it performs a METALINGUAL (ie, glossing) function. "I don't follow you - what do you mean?" asks the addressee, or in Shakesperaen diction, "What is't thou say'st?" And the addresser in anticipation of usch recapturing question inquires: "Do you know what I mean?" Imagine such an exasperating dialogue: "The sophomore was plucked." "But what is plucked?" "Plucked means the same as flunked." "And flunked?" "To be flunked is to faile an exam." "And what is sophomore?" persists the interrogator innocent of school vocabulary. "A sophomore is a second-year student." All these equational sentences voney information merely about the lexical code
of English; their function is strictly metalingual. Any process of language lerning, in particular child acquisition of the mother tongue, makes wide use of such metalingual operations; and aphasia may often be defined as a loss of ability for metalingual operations."
addressee need to check up whether they use the same code, speech is focused on the code: it performs a METALINGUAL (ie, glossing) function. "I don't follow you - what do you mean?" asks the addressee, or in Shakesperaen diction, "What is't thou say'st?" And the addresser in anticipation of usch recapturing question inquires: "Do you know what I mean?" Imagine such an exasperating dialogue: "The sophomore was plucked." "But what is plucked?" "Plucked means the same as flunked." "And flunked?" "To be flunked is to faile an exam." "And what is sophomore?" persists the interrogator innocent of school vocabulary. "A sophomore is a second-year student." All these equational sentences voney information merely about the lexical code
of English; their function is strictly metalingual. Any process of language lerning, in particular child acquisition of the mother tongue, makes wide use of such metalingual operations; and aphasia may often be defined as a loss of ability for metalingual operations."
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
The most serious post I've authored so far
Check this one out:
http://xkcd.com/c244.html
It's interesting in that it refers to itself. But it's not meta -- it's self-referential. And this prompted me to reflect upon the various terms that are used to describe events that refer to themselves or describe themselves, and attempt to disambiguate them.
meta
One can think of meta as a function that takes an object and returns an object that describes the input object using the technique characeristic of the object itself. MP3 metadata, for example, is data about the mp3 file, but not the audio itself (for example, artist information, album cover picture, etc.). It's meta because, just like the mp3 file is described by data (sets of bits), the metadata is described by the same means.
In real-life meta is shorthand for a situation in which instead of the object, the focus is on the description of the object that shares the same characteristics as the object itself. For example, suppose we are documenting the goals of our projects. One project's goal could be to understand the relationships between customers' preferences and their purchasing power. Another project's goal could be to determine all players in the currency exchange market. If we step back, we might want to determine what's the goal of us documenting all those goals. This is a meta goal. It doesn't refer to the object itself (documenting the goals) but it describes it, and uses the same technique (determining the goal).
It is crucial to understand that sharing the characteristic of the underlying object is a necessary condition. In the example above, for example, we could do many things with the given collection of goals to describe it -- we could determine their number, for example, or figure out that they all take just one sentence. But it's the fact that we're determining the goal of writing up those goals that makes the situation meta.
Not everything can be metafied, but I claim that once it's been metafied, it can then be metafied ad infinitum.
self-reference
This is most often confused with meta. If something refers to an instance of itself (either a different instance or the same), then it's self-referential. For example, if you're playing an RPG game and your character instantiates an RPG game, then you're using self-reference. Self-reference is often used to provide paradoxes: for example, take the following statement: "There are two misteaks in this sentence." There is only one mistake in this sentence, but the fact that the sentence failed to provide an accurate count of the number of mistakes is a mistake in itself -- so there are two mistakes in the sentence. Which means that the sentence only contains one mistake. But then... (ad inf.) The sentence is self-referential. Self-referential statements can cause infinite loops (but iterative, not recursive infinite loops), like in the example above.
recursion
Recursion is a special case of self-reference when the object invokes a new instance of itself rather than refer to itself. The sentence in the above case is not recursive because it does not invoke a new instance. Similarly, a piece of code that does recursion is itself not recursive: it's, however, still self-referential. An example of a recursive statement is "n factorial is n times larger than n-1 factorial". This is recursive: to determine what 5 factorial is, you have to instantiate this sentence multiple times. In the mistakes example above, you don't need to instantiate multiple copies of the sentence.
reflection
Reflection is the ability to inspect one's own definition. Reflection is a special case of meta.
reflexivity
An operation is reflexive if it operates on itself. This is not really self-referential (is the statement "my dog is cleaning himself" self-referential?).
self-relativity
It seems to be that self-relativity is the ability to relate to oneself. A simplest example of self-relativity is the word "I". If something is self-relative, it is capable of producing self-referential statements.
deep
A lot of things in the world are just deep. They're not meta or self-referential. We like talking about them because they seem complex. That doesn't make them any less sophisticated or interesting, but a distinction must be made. An example of something that's not really meta or self-referential is the barber paradox:
"There's a barber in the town that shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself. Who shaves the barber?". This is paradoxical because if the barber shaves himself, then by the first statement, the barber cannot does not shave himself. If the barber doesn't shave himself, then by the first statement he shaves himself.
Actually, this is not really a paradox -- there is a flaw in how the first statement is constructed. Let S(i) be a function that assigns to every person i a person that shaves them. Then S(i)=b ^ S(i)=i encodes the first statement. It is meant to be a tautology (since the statement describes something about this hypothetical world that's supposed to be true for everyone in the town). But if we substitute b for i, we get S(b)=b ^ S(b)=b which is false. Hence the first statement cannot be a description of the world. In other words, it is impossible for the barber to shave everyone who doesn't shave himself. It's a little like saying, "The square root of every integer is an integer. What is the square root of 2?" and claiming it's a paradox. In actuality, the first statement is simply false.
In any case, this is not really self-referential; it's just deep. The fact that the barber shaves himself isn't self-referential, but "shaving" becomes reflexive when it's applied to the barber.
http://xkcd.com/c244.html
It's interesting in that it refers to itself. But it's not meta -- it's self-referential. And this prompted me to reflect upon the various terms that are used to describe events that refer to themselves or describe themselves, and attempt to disambiguate them.
meta
One can think of meta as a function that takes an object and returns an object that describes the input object using the technique characeristic of the object itself. MP3 metadata, for example, is data about the mp3 file, but not the audio itself (for example, artist information, album cover picture, etc.). It's meta because, just like the mp3 file is described by data (sets of bits), the metadata is described by the same means.
In real-life meta is shorthand for a situation in which instead of the object, the focus is on the description of the object that shares the same characteristics as the object itself. For example, suppose we are documenting the goals of our projects. One project's goal could be to understand the relationships between customers' preferences and their purchasing power. Another project's goal could be to determine all players in the currency exchange market. If we step back, we might want to determine what's the goal of us documenting all those goals. This is a meta goal. It doesn't refer to the object itself (documenting the goals) but it describes it, and uses the same technique (determining the goal).
It is crucial to understand that sharing the characteristic of the underlying object is a necessary condition. In the example above, for example, we could do many things with the given collection of goals to describe it -- we could determine their number, for example, or figure out that they all take just one sentence. But it's the fact that we're determining the goal of writing up those goals that makes the situation meta.
Not everything can be metafied, but I claim that once it's been metafied, it can then be metafied ad infinitum.
self-reference
This is most often confused with meta. If something refers to an instance of itself (either a different instance or the same), then it's self-referential. For example, if you're playing an RPG game and your character instantiates an RPG game, then you're using self-reference. Self-reference is often used to provide paradoxes: for example, take the following statement: "There are two misteaks in this sentence." There is only one mistake in this sentence, but the fact that the sentence failed to provide an accurate count of the number of mistakes is a mistake in itself -- so there are two mistakes in the sentence. Which means that the sentence only contains one mistake. But then... (ad inf.) The sentence is self-referential. Self-referential statements can cause infinite loops (but iterative, not recursive infinite loops), like in the example above.
recursion
Recursion is a special case of self-reference when the object invokes a new instance of itself rather than refer to itself. The sentence in the above case is not recursive because it does not invoke a new instance. Similarly, a piece of code that does recursion is itself not recursive: it's, however, still self-referential. An example of a recursive statement is "n factorial is n times larger than n-1 factorial". This is recursive: to determine what 5 factorial is, you have to instantiate this sentence multiple times. In the mistakes example above, you don't need to instantiate multiple copies of the sentence.
reflection
Reflection is the ability to inspect one's own definition. Reflection is a special case of meta.
reflexivity
An operation is reflexive if it operates on itself. This is not really self-referential (is the statement "my dog is cleaning himself" self-referential?).
self-relativity
It seems to be that self-relativity is the ability to relate to oneself. A simplest example of self-relativity is the word "I". If something is self-relative, it is capable of producing self-referential statements.
deep
A lot of things in the world are just deep. They're not meta or self-referential. We like talking about them because they seem complex. That doesn't make them any less sophisticated or interesting, but a distinction must be made. An example of something that's not really meta or self-referential is the barber paradox:
"There's a barber in the town that shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself. Who shaves the barber?". This is paradoxical because if the barber shaves himself, then by the first statement, the barber cannot does not shave himself. If the barber doesn't shave himself, then by the first statement he shaves himself.
Actually, this is not really a paradox -- there is a flaw in how the first statement is constructed. Let S(i) be a function that assigns to every person i a person that shaves them. Then S(i)=b ^ S(i)=i encodes the first statement. It is meant to be a tautology (since the statement describes something about this hypothetical world that's supposed to be true for everyone in the town). But if we substitute b for i, we get S(b)=b ^ S(b)=b which is false. Hence the first statement cannot be a description of the world. In other words, it is impossible for the barber to shave everyone who doesn't shave himself. It's a little like saying, "The square root of every integer is an integer. What is the square root of 2?" and claiming it's a paradox. In actuality, the first statement is simply false.
In any case, this is not really self-referential; it's just deep. The fact that the barber shaves himself isn't self-referential, but "shaving" becomes reflexive when it's applied to the barber.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Social Networking Sites
There has been an abundance of social networking sites. I'm thinking of creating an application that allows you to create your own social networking site. You'd specify a few parameters, and out pops a social networking site!
Sunday, April 8, 2007
Exception handling
System.OutOfMemoryException: Exception of type
'System.OutOfMemoryException' was thrown. at: throw new
System.OutOfMemoryException(...
'System.OutOfMemoryException' was thrown. at: throw new
System.OutOfMemoryException(...
Saturday, April 7, 2007
google 411
http://labs.google.com/goog411/
You can dial 1-800-GOOG-411 to get information on local businesses. Dial from any phone anywhere in the US (yes, the service is nationwide). So if you call them and ask them what the number is of a free Google information service on local businesses, I guess they won't be able to help you since Google 411 only lists local listings and not nationwide services...
You can dial 1-800-GOOG-411 to get information on local businesses. Dial from any phone anywhere in the US (yes, the service is nationwide). So if you call them and ask them what the number is of a free Google information service on local businesses, I guess they won't be able to help you since Google 411 only lists local listings and not nationwide services...
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
It's been awhile...
At first I thought I'd Just drop a quick post mentioning that I have some pretty awesome meta things to post in the next few days or so and then realized that this post is also meta.
Man I love meta.
Man I love meta.
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